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The Battle Of The Consoles: From Atari To The Xbox
msolnik writes: "There's been a lot of talk about Xbox, and GameCube, and even more speculation about the technology inside the box. However, the console wars are not going to be won based purely on technology. There's a long history of cyclical win and lose peaks and troughs for companies that have tried to stay the course in this business. Nintendo stands alone in having survived a number of generations of innovation and still managed to remain a contender in the market. Tom's Hardware has delivered this unique assessment of The Console Wars." Update: 12/06 16:28 GMT by M : Note that Tom's has updated some of the charts in the article - they note that there was a misunderstanding between Tom's and the article's author as to which version of the charts to post.
The history was superficial, and the information on the current consoles was wrong in respect to the Game Cube.
First, he makes the common mistake of giving the polygon/sec counts. MS and Sony have theoretical maximum counts while Nintendo's count is real-world with all of the eye candy turned on. He then uses this comparison to show the inferiority of the Cube hardware when the framerate of Cube games could be higher given the same games with complex action.
Look at the columns of features. See "N/A" next to most of the Cube's fetures? It makes it look like there's nothing there, yet the Cube has good marks in most of these rows, such as audio, HDTV, broadband and 56K modem.